sendmail question regarding images

safra · Jun 14, 2001

Hi,

I wonder if it is possible to send emails with images using sendmail?

I tried this:

open (MAIL, "| $maillocation -t&quot

|| die "cant use $maillocation";
print MAIL "from: $from\n";
print MAIL "To: $email\n";
print MAIL "Reply-to: $from\n";
print MAIL "Subject: Test\n";
print MAIL '<IMG SRC="../images/app.jpg" WIDTH="5" HEIGHT="5" BORDER="0">';
close (MAIL);

But it didn't arrive!

Regards,

Ron

sophisticate · Jun 14, 2001

It is possible.

First off, you need to create/adjust the "Content-Type" line so it reflects the MIME type of the file you're sending. For a jpeg, this would be "image/jpeg". Then you need to encode your file with Base64 encoding and set the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" line to "base64". Once you've done that, you can pipe it through sendmail or through a direct socket as normal.

If you want all of this to be done for you, I would recommend the MIME::Lite module available from CPAN. The module also has support for multipart messages which are an absolute pain to deal with by hand.

Hope this helps,

brendanc@icehouse.net

safra · Jun 14, 2001

Thanks for your answer, Sophisticate. As I have no idea how to start doing all of what you suggested I looked at the module MIME::Lite.

I tried this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; #without this I get errors!

use MIME::Lite;

$msg = MIME::Lite->new(
To =>$email,
Subject =>'HTML with in-line images!',
Type =>'multipart/related'
);
$msg->attach(Type => 'text/html',
Data => qq{ <body>
Here's <i>my</i> image:
<img src="cid:myimage.gif">
</body> }
);
$msg->attach(Type => 'image/gif',
Id => 'myimage.gif',
Path => '../images/arrow.gif',
);
$msg->send("sendmail", "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oem&quot

;

I get an error message so probably the module is not installed on my server. Is there a way to check this?

Regards,
Ron

P3rL · Jun 15, 2001

Try this it will tell the html reader that the email it is displaying is a html document.

open (MAIL, "| $maillocation -t&quot

|| die "cant use $maillocation";
print MAIL "from: $from\n";
print MAIL "To: $email\n";
print MAIL "Reply-to: $from\n";
print MAIL "Subject: Test\n";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; #this has to be printed here
print MAIL '<IMG SRC="../images/app.jpg" WIDTH="5" HEIGHT="5" BORDER="0">';
close (MAIL);

- Note that if it is not printed there it will just display your html code as plain text

- Anoher thing you have to display the full url of the image, something like you have above will not work for others, you have to display the full url, something like:

<IMG SRC="

http://www.yourserver.com/images/app.jpg"

WIDTH="5" HEIGHT="5" BORDER="0">

Good Luck

sophisticate · Jun 17, 2001

If you're on a Linux machine, you can check currently installed modules with a one line shell script. All the modules are stored in one of the paths in the @INC list, so if you do a search within each of those directories, you'll be able to see what you've got.

The shell script is:

Code:

for x in `perl -e 'print join&quot;\n&quot;,@INC'`; do find $x -iname '*.pm'; done

Keep in mind that whenever you see a :: in a module name, that means the module spans multiple directories. For instance, MIME::Lite might be /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/MIME/Lite.pm.

Hope this helps,

brendanc@icehouse.net

safra · Jun 17, 2001

I will try that Sophisticate. I contacted my server and had a look at the module, I can simply install it in my lib folder.

But in the mean time I was just experimenting and I had a lucky guess. I did what P3rL suggested which works perfectly.

But I have another problem I'm trying to create a script to send an email to all members of the mailing list.

I can't even get it to work with a simple text mailing.

This is the particular part:

foreach $mailData(@mailData){
($name,$email,$init) = split(/\|/,$mailData);
open (MAIL, "| $maillocation -t&quot

|| die "aw, cant use $maillocation";
print MAIL "To: $email\n";
print MAIL "from: $from\n";
print MAIL "Reply-to: $from\n";
print MAIL "Subject: test html mail\n";
print MAIL "Dear $name\n";
close (MAIL);
}

This results in internal server errors. When $email is replaced for an email address it works fine (the correct name is listed in the contents). When $mail is replaced for another string, defined outside the foreach statement, it also works fine. I checked the email addresses in the mailling list and they are correct.

Any ideas what could possibly cause the error?

Ron

sophisticate · Jun 18, 2001

It probably has something to do with the fact that you're using the same variable name in two different contexts in your loop. You actually don't need to declare a temporary variable for the loop... Perl provides one for you ($_). Change:

Code:

foreach $mailData(@mailData) {
($name,$email,$init) = split(/\|/,$mailData);

to:

Code:

foreach(@mailData) {
    my($name,$email,$init) = split /\|/;

or just use a separate variable name:

Code:

foreach my $m(@mailData) {
    my($name,$email,$init) = split /\|/,$m;

Hope this helps,

brendanc@icehouse.net

safra · Jun 18, 2001

Hi sophisticate, I made some changes as you suggested. The first time I still received an error. The second time, without changing anything, it worked? Thanks!

I was thinking about using this for my mailling list. Am I right that I may run in problems if, in the ideal case, I will have a reasonable amount of members to email to. Will this peace of code be able to sent a good amount of emails. At which number should I expect problems?

Ron,

jennuhw · Sep 17, 2001

I am trying to send pdf files as an attachment from sendmail to outside email addresses by going through our Exchange server. Some people are getting the attachment encoded as base64. I was wondering if there was a setting I could do on my end to fix this so everyone can receive the attachment properly.

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sendmail question regarding images

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